Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

“ [86] off the existing Government, and form a new one that suits them better. Nor is this right confined to cases where the people of an existing Government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, putting down a minority intermingled with or near about them, who may oppose them.”

On the eve of hostilities the New York Tribune declared: “Whenever portion of this Union, large enough to form an independent, self-sustaining nation, shall see fit to say authentically to the residue, ‘We want to get away from you,’ we shall say-and we trust self-respect, if not regard for the principle of self-government, will constrain the residue of the American people to say-Go!”

At a later period, Mr. Seward, then President Lincoln's Secretary of State, used the following language to Mr. Adams, the United States Minister at London: “For these reasons he [Mr. Lincoln] would not be disposed to reject a cardinal dogma of theirs [the Secessionists], namely, that the Federal Government could not reduce the seceding States to obedience by conquest, even although he were disposed to question that proposition. But in fact the President willingly accepts it as true. Only an imperial or despotic government could subjugate thoroughly disaffected and insurrectionary members of the State. This Federal Republican system of ours is, of all forms of government, the very one most unfitted for such a labour.”

It was in the face of this plain and abundant record that the North, as we shall hereafter see, prepared to make upon the seceded Southern States a war the most terrible in modern annals, and the most monstrous of Christian times. But we must return here to the course of events immediately following the secession of South Carolina.

There could be no doubt of the disposition of all the Cotton States to accompany South Carolina in her withdrawal from the Union, and to make common cause with her. But there was some hesitation as to the time and mode of action; and in Georgia especially there was a strong party in favour of holding a conference of all the Southern States before taking the decisive and irrevocable step. The influence of Alexander H. Stephens was not only given to this party in Georgia, but betrayed a design to keep the State in the Union. He had made a speech of great ingenuity, to show that the cause of the Union was not yet hopeless, that all honourable means should be used to save it-that, notwithstanding the election of Mr. Lincoln, the Northern States might yield to a determined admonition from the South. But to this art of the demagogue there were plain and forcible replies. Mr. Howell Cobb urged that delay was dangerous, and that the Legislature ought to pass an act of secession to be ratified by the people; Mr. Toombs insisted that all hope of justice from the North was gone, and that nothing remained but separation, and, if